News

With its $67 million Center Street campus construction project on schedule for completion in January 2006, Berkeley’s Vista Community College is planning a birthday bash this week to celebrate its 30th anniversary.
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Jubilee Restoration Inc., in response to a Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) investigation into misuse of funds, released records last week showing that it spent federal grant money designated for a homeless youth outreach program to pay employees working for its housing development arm.
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A small but vocal group of demonstrators rallied for an hour in front of the KGO-TV offices in San Francisco on Monday morning, protesting what they called “media silence on 2004 election irregularities.” Demonstrators later marched to the San Francisco offices of United States Senator Barbara Boxer where organizers met with Boxer’s staff.
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With battles still raging over new development in Berkeley, the three newly elected Berkeley City Councilmembers are facing plenty of scrutiny as they prepare to name members to commissions that have a big say on the future face of the city.
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President George Bush’s re-election has some European politicians on the far right and the far left scrambling to rethink the role of faith in the daily life their constituencies, as well as their position on Christian values.
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My wife and I hosted one of the over 1,600 house meetings held Sunday night to chart the future of MoveOn PAC. The tightly structured event asked participants to select their top issue and strategy for the next two to four years, but left no time for the larger questions about how people can get involved in grassroots activism in between elections or how the group should prioritize its funds.
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“Purses, clothing, weavings, holiday décor” and jewelry, with many items priced $10 or less, are among the gifts offered at the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant Holiday Craft Fair Dec. 11-12 at the First Congregational Church. Most crafts for sale are made by indigenous women in cooperatives in Central America, Asia, Haiti, and Africa.
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Two years ago my husband and I waited, with others, for an AC Transit bus on the corner of 55th Street and Telegraph Avenue. When the bus came, the driver stopped and allowed the able-bodied people on. Then he closed the doors. “I’m running late,” he sho uted at us. “You’ll have to wait for the next bus.”
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With the election over it is distressing to hear our City Council and staff continue to distort the citizens’ reasons for voting down all of the city’s tax proposals. The latest example is Kriss Worthington’s Nov. 16 condemnation of the groups opposed to eliminating one of the city’s fire truck companies. He accused them of “spreading hate and lies.”
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Progressives and Democrats (not always the same thing) are still licking our wounds from Nov. 2. But we’ve begun a vigorous discussion about how to rebuild our capacity to win elections and influence people. Some of us debated this with a few thousand of our closest friends on Sunday, Nov. 21, courtesy of MoveOn.org’s national house party and online discussion board. Here’s my contribution to the fray:
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The colorful, vivid imagery born in the West Berkeley studio of artist Juana Alicia that graces buildings across the nation may soon appear on the walls of a five-story building on University Avenue.
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In this history of the American experience of free speech during war time, Geoffrey Stone explodes the myth that elite professors cannot write compelling prose. Stone’s narrative of the ups and downs of the First Amendment in times of national emergency is a gripping read, full of free speech heroes and villains, victories and defeats.
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There aren’t many native live oaks on our streets, though we can see them easily enough up in Tilden Regional Park, in private yards, and in some public places like the UC Berkeley campus. The ones on campus are survivors (so far) of an unfortunate rash of deaths caused not by Sudden Oak Death Syndrome but by landscape errors.
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Final vote tallies posted from the Nov. 2 election show that despite significantly closing the margin in post-election counting, Berkeley’s medical marijuana Measure R has lost by 191 votes. The final totals were 25,167 to 24,976.
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UC Berkeley officials are in the midst of negotiations to turn much of their Richmond Field Station into a corporate/academic research park, with the facility—including property retained by the university—to be renamed the Bayside Research Campus.
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The owner of the site of the proposed five-story condo and retail project planned for 2701 Shattuck Ave. is the Choyce Family Trust, the creation of the Rev. Gordon Choyce Sr., pastor of the Missionary Church of God in Christ and head of low-income housing builder Jubilee Restoration.
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In a time of fiscal problems affecting all government agencies, the Berkeley Unified School District announced last week that all the news isn’t bad: BUSD staff has completed a refinancing of the 1992 Measure A bonds that is expected to save the district $3.2 million over the next 20 years.
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Eighteen days following the initial request, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) has agreed this week to investigate several incidents of election problems from the recent November election to satisfy the concerns brought forth by U.S. Reps. John Conyers (D-MI), Barbara Lee (D-CA), and 12 other congressmembers.
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This past January, New Yorker essayist Malcolm Gladwell observed that sports-utility vehicles are bestsellers because Americans have bought into the marketing myth that SUVs are safer than conventional cars. Actually, they are more dangerous because they are less maneuverable and more prone to tip over.
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Poor Democrats. They stand like Jack Nicholson as the Joker in the Batman movie, deserted and alone on an inner city street, watching the Republican juggernaut disappearing in the distance overhead, wondering why their toys don’t work like that.
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My sincere hope is that the Daily Planet follows up with an article on the public safety issues surrounding Cal Stadium’s current location and proposed future location of the Stadium Rebuild Project. It is dramatic to put neighborhoods in an adversarial role against this university and its athletic program, but to do so is missing the point. We are not the best representatives of the public safety issue because of our clear self-interests, but at the same time, we perhaps better than anybody else are all too familiar with the public safety issues because of where we live.
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Although the election is over, people still have Query stickers on their cars and signs endorsing or opposing the different measures. The most popular sign in my area, West Berkeley, seems to be the red and white “Vote No on Q.” Measure Q was the Berkeley ballot initiative that would have made prostitution a low priority for local police. The plethora of red and white signs down San Pablo Avenue promised that voting no on Q would protect women and protect neighborhoods. The defeat of Measure Q was a lost opportunity for this historically progressive city and guarantees that the current system will continue to persecute sex workers and fail to make our community safe.
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Who’s Who in the Tough Love Game—Ishmael Reed’s “serious comedy” at the Black Repertory Group—opens with a strange tableau, a wild variety of figures posed in front of an American flag and a chart reading “Only Foundation Agenda.”
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In a world increasingly filled with big box chain stores, mass-market catalogs, and “unique” gifts manufactured in the millions, where to shop for distinctive and meaningful gifts as the holidays approach?
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Opinion

Editorials

The long weekend gave us the opportunity to spend a couple of days in what we still call “the country,” on the property where the publisher’s mother settled after she came to Santa Cruz as one of UCSC’s first faculty members. She called it “the ranch”—about 60 rocky acres, a fair portion of which is pretty much vertical, mostly covered with second growth redwoods and eucalypts planted at the turn of the 20th century. The driveway through the woods is about a mile long, rutted dirt with seven switchbacks, an easy ascent for the benefit of the horses who pulled wagonloads of supplies up to the summer camp operated by the owners at the time, but a challenge for automobiles.
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